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But he could be all those things in service of a ridiculous scenario, too.
And oh, he did it so well. Like the scenario was completely real.
So it was easy to act like it was real back.
“Except insult my clothing.”
“That isn’t a good reason to destroy my terrible empire.”
“Yeah, but the fact that you just admitted your empire is terrible probably is.”
“I only called it that so I was in keeping with the framework you’d established,” he said, because he was just admitting it now. He was admitting that he had gone with her weird thing. And oh god, that was so good.
Even if she couldn’t admit it. “Despite the fact that the framework I’d established is total nonsense I made up just to drive you round the bend.”
“Especially because it is. Otherwise, it’s just chaos.”
“I think it might be chaos anyway, to be honest.”
“Yeah, I know. But I’m frantically trying to pretend otherwise.”
“You don’t look frantic, though.”
“How do I look, then?”
Like you’re enjoying yourself again, she thought.
But knew she had to pretend otherwise. “Really annoyed,” she said.
Because the thing of it was: this was the truth. Hedidlook annoyed.
It was just that he had so many flavors of annoyed that she was starting to see that some of them were less meant than others. Some of them were faintly amused, or almost relaxed. And he knew it. He accepted it.
Or at least, accepted it in his own inimitable way.
“That’s just my default expression,” he said.
“So you’re not actually, I take it.”
“Maybe. Maybe not.”
“There’s nomaybeabout your own emotions.”
“There is when everything makes you so mad it’s hard to tellwhen something does the opposite,” he said, then only seemed to realize exactly what he’d told her after it was out. A bit of gut-wrenching emotional truth, she thought, of the sort that he very plainly hadn’t processed that much before.
And it threw him a bit.
His eyes went briefly wide.
She saw him mouth the wordfuck.
Then he passed a hand over his face. As if that might make the feelings he was clearly having go away. Or at least hide them from her. Even though he had to know he didn’t need to do anything of the kind. And if he didn’t know it, she was going to make sure he learned.
Through the medium of lighthearted encouragement.
“Well, maybe we could test it out. You tell me a thing that got your back up, in the past. And we’ll compare how you feel when you talk about it to how you feel when you play daft games with me about how I’m a spy who’s mad about dungarees,” she said, with what she hoped was the right amount of sly humor. And his expression said that she’d gotten it right.
He almost smiled in a rueful sort of way.
